This study was undertaken to determine what differences are found among personality characteristics of superior students, in special English classes, who score high on a standardized achievement test and superior students in the same classes who score low on this test. A second dimension of the study was to determine whether the same personality characteristics are evident among superior students in these classes at the eighth, tenth and twelfth grade levels.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Education, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education (Educational Psychology), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1995. / The present research study evaluated an unresearched assessment battery used to determine student trainability at a multi-disability commercial college. The issues of validity - specifically criterion-related validity and content-related validity and dynamic assessment were the main focus of the study. Revisions to the assessment battery where necessary were recommended, Fifty-two students from the multi-disability college formed the sample population for establishing the criterion-related validity of the assessment battery. Students assessment results were correlated with the number of credits .hey obtained on course completion using the Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient. This research established that useful inferences about student trainability could be made from the existing assessment battery scores. Establishing the content-related validity of the assessment battery was a two foid process. Firstly, course lecturers completed a self-administered questionnaire to determine what skills/ attributes were necessary for success in the four courses offered at the College. Secondly, a workshop was held with a multi-disciplinary team of professionals to determine what skills/ attributes were being tapped by the various sub-tests of the battery. It was established that twelve of the skills/attributes necessary for course success were not tapped on the existing assessment battery. Measures which tap these skills/attdbutes need to be included in the assessment battery so that its content validity can be established. Given the controversy relating to standardised/static testing it was important to research the relevance and usefulness of the introduction of a dynamic assessment component to the existing battery. Dynamic assessment would allow for learning potential to be tapped. Analyses of variance were conducted to determine the relationships between the variables - race, educational level and type of disability with performance on the assessment battery. The significant relationships between educational level and performance and type of disability and performance

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Washington State University, December 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-134).

Contextualization is often added to mathematical achievement items to place targeted mathematical operations in a real world context or in combinations with other mathematical skills. Such items may have unintended sources of difficulty, such as greater cognitive complexity than specified in the test blueprint. These types of items are being introduced to achievement exams through assessment programs such as SBAC and PARCC. Cognitive models have been created to assess sources of cognitive complexity in mathematics items, including a global model (Embretson&Daniel, 2008) and an adapted model (Lutz, Embretson,&Poggio, 2010). The current study proposes a new cognitive model structured around sources of working memory burden with an emphasis on contextualization. Full-information item response (IRT) models were applied to a state accountability test of mathematics achievement in middle school to examine impact on psychometric properties related to burden on working memory.

The Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High Schools and the Basic Achievement Tests for Junior High School Students have influenced the right of almost three hundred thousand middle school graduates each year. The schemes have become the most important educational issue so far since they change apace, and bring huge dispute and problems, comparing to the former Senior (Vocational) High School Joint Entrance Exam. The main topic of this study is " The Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High Schools." We mainly use history research method, with the assistance of history review method, to examine the development and history of our multiple schemes for entering secondary high schools domestically. The four purposes of this research are, firstly, to understand the development and history of the multiple schemes for entering secondary schools in our country. Secondly, we analyze a series of practical contents and working conditions in the multiple enrollment programs. Thirdly, we discuss gains and losses of the multiple schemes for entering secondary high schools and its combined programs. Fourthly, we propose improvement suggestions for the multiple schemes of entering secondary high schools. According to the results of the study, we gain the following conclusions: 1.The enrolment system of multiple schemes for entering secondary high schools shows multiple appearances and multiple functions. (1)The Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High School is the most enormous reform of our secondary admission system in these years in Taiwan. (2)The ways of enrolment go toward multiple evaluations and it helps cultivate students' basic abilities, multiple intelligence and promote balance development of five ethics. (3)Taking care of both excellent and average students, it can helps students learn happily, grow healthily and also develop their talents freely. (4)It helps practice the system of separating examination and recruiting students, develop the function of choosing schools and students with autonomy. (5)It strengthens the relationship and helps its educational development between Senior (Vocational) High School and Junior High School. (6)The Basic Achievement Tests, the center of Multiple Enrolments, are the biggest, the most extensively standardized test and including the most students in our educational history. (7)The Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High School have become the new emphasis of living and learning to our middle school education. (8)The tests in each subject in the Basic Achievement Tests are connected to life, and with flexibility and high quality. Thus, it gets many positive notes from junior high school students and teachers. 2.Here come several problems of the multiple schemes for entering secondary high schools. (1)Moving admission systems doesn't take ethics of policy into consideration. (2)The policy of Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High Schools has become a super "Research of Action " educational reform. (3)The Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High Schools depart from the spirit of multiple evaluations. (4)The education reform of admission system should not stop at the point of its technical amendment. (5)The Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High Schools becomes another kind of Joint Entrance Examination; the value of having superstition on star schools is still the difficulty of practicing the Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High Schools. (6)9-year Joint Curricula Plan for Elementary and Junior High Schools that belongs to curriculum reform is behind, but the reform of Enrolment system, which belongs to curriculum evaluation, is ahead. The reforming procedure is upside-down, increasing the difficulty of moving the Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High Schools. (7)We short of educational funds in middle schools, so it is hard to achieve balance and build school features between the country school and city school. That will also be harmful to the competitive abilities of our middle schools. (8)Using the grades of Basic Achievement Tests as the only criteria for entering senior and vocational high schools is misused. We offer the following suggestions toward the problems of findings in this research paper: (1)The construction and amendment of the Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High School should return to the thinking direction of educational essence and standpoint and should never go back to the old way of Joint Entrance Examination. (2)The Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High School are the main criteria of education reform. Thus, the ministry of education should be careful, clear and stable to the policy planning. (3)Make the Basic Achievement Tests as a reference criteria of admission ways for entering secondary high schools, bur not the only criteria. (4)Simplify and synthesize the two admission ways of "Application for Admission" and "Selection for Admission," and have the "Application for Admission" become the main stream in our admission system. (5)We should continually discuss to synthesize and simplify the pattern of recruiting students, "The Multiple Schemes for Entering Senior and Vocational High School" and "The Multiple Schemes for Entering Junior College." (6)The ministry of education should establish the specialized test-making institute and the center of registered distribution as soon as possible. (7)The ministry of education should plan to balance the educational level of secondary school in each area and make secondary high school education exquisite. (8)We suggest to continually strengthen the constructions of test questions in the Basic Achievement Tests and the work of deepening and extending test questions, in order to elevate qualities of test questions. (9)It should be an inevitable trend to take academic performance at junior high school into consideration gradually in the Multiple Schemes for Entering Secondary High School after full preparations. (10)We should aggressively discuss to synthesize the three big recent schemes of educational reform," The Multiple Schemes for Entering Senior and Vocational High Schools", "The Schemes for Joining Senior and Vocational High Schools in each community" and "9-year Joint Curricula Plan for Elementary and Junior High Schools." Also, we should move 12-year compulsory education actively in order to construct excellent environment of secondary education and develop great multiple schemes for entering secondary high schools.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education [Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology] / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

The poor school performance among black children in South Africa is best understood by focussing on the generative mechanisms which underlie performance. This research was undertaken within Pascual-Leone's neo-Piagetian Theory of Constructive Operators, which models cognitive functioning as a bilevel system of content-specific schemes and situation-free silent operators. Of the seven silent operators posited, Pascual-Leone is able to distinguish cognitive competence, or mental capacity (structural M, or Ms), from learning (L structuring) which is dependent upon environment. The M-construct is a reserve of mental attentional energy which can be applied to task-relevant schemes to boost their activation weights. The Compound Stimulus Visual Information (CSVI) task was used to distinguish the amount of M-power subjects employed in a given task (functional M, or Mf ), as well as the efficiency with which they used this Mf. Children from the black township of lndaleni, outside Richmond, Natal, South Africa, were selected. Thirty subjects in each of four age groups, seven-, nine-, eleven-, and thirteen-year-olds, were tested. The Children's Embedded Figures Test (CEFT) and the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) test were administered in groups. Two versions of the CSVI were given: the Free Response (CSVI-FR) and the Tachistoscopic version. The latter was analysed in terms of first look (CSVI-1STL), which gives an estimate of Mf, and repeated looks (CSVI-TACH) which estimates the number of attending acts made over the task. The CEFT was found not to distinguish cognitive style in the sample. As the sample was of low socioeconomic status and rural, it was argued that the subjects were predominantly field dependent.Results were analysed for the total sample as one FD group. Results showed eleven- and thirteen-year-old children's arousal executives were increasingly poor (i.e., the eleven-year-olds brought one unit less than their available M to the task.). Performance on the RSPM showed a dramatic decline in percentile rank with age, which confirmed these increasingly poor arousal executives. This concurs with a regular cross-cultural Piagetian finding which shows no formal operational thinking in certain cultures. All subjects evidenced poor temporal executives (i.e., made fewer attending acts than predicted in task analyses). In the CSVI-FR analysis It was shown that children employed more efficient temporal executives as the stimulus became more complex, but their maximum performance still did not reach the predicted level. The results confirm patterns found among children from other disadvantaged environments. Proposals are made for further research to isolate the factors involved in the poor arousal executive strength of the present sample, which conflicts with a previous finding that Zulu-speaking children employ their full Ms.The findings are related to the poor educational environment of the children and suggestions are made for improving school performance by encouraging active problem solving. This would focus first on maximising M arousal, afterwhich temporal executives may be improved. Further, a warning is made to those who see training as a useful method to improve performance, for this does not maximise arousal and temporal executives within the child, but rather reduces the demand of the task. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1987.

The purposes of this study were to survey Indiana high school principals, teachers, and counselors (a) to determine their levels of level of knowledge in testing, interpretation of test scores, research on the impact of graduation examinations, and performance assessment; (b) to determine their levels of experience with minimal competency testing, graduation examination programs and performance assessment; and (c) to profile each group's and the entire group's views of the purposes, content, standards of achievement, and administrative procedures for a graduation examination. Additionally, the study sought to identify what these educators predicted would be the impacts of such examinations.The populations studied were randomly selected samples from three groups of educators: (a) principals (350); (b) teachers (753); and (c) guidance counselors (524) in Indiana public high schools. A survey concentrating on the issues central to the purpose, content, standards of achievement, administrative procedures, and impact of graduation examinations was developed and validated by the researcher.It was found that principals and counselors perceived themselves to be more knowledgeable about and experienced with testing than did teachers. Indiana educators preferred (a) a high school graduation examination with a combination of open-ended constructed responses, performance tasks, and multiple-choice questions whose content was determined by a state-level committee of educators and consisted of a broad spectrum of skills and content areas; (b) full inclusion of students with disabilities, if there were reasonable and appropriate accommodations and if these students' scores were not used to evaluate teachers or schools; and (c) awarding two high school diplomas. Indiana educators predicted that if high school graduation examinations were enacted, the following would increase: (a) legal challenges and lawsuits; (b) the public's evaluation of education based on test scores; (c) the public's perception of test scores as the major goal of schooling; (d) stress on teachers and administrators; (e) pressure on teachers to change; (f) time demands on educators; (g) measures to protect students and schools from harm caused by high-stakes tests; (h) drop out rates; (i) emphasis on tested content and skills; and (k) state control. / Department of Educational Leadership

In order is meet the requiremcnts for technically sound assessment instruments as required by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), this study investigates the construct validity of Indiana's alternate assessment, the Indiana Standards Tool for Alternate Reporting (ISTAR), a teacher rating assessment as compared to Indiana's general educational assessment, the Indiana Statewide Test of Educational Progress - Plus (ISTEP+), a criterion referenced assessment. Study participants consisted of 284 students from grades 3, 6, and 8. Students were from general and special education. All students in the study were considered not to have significant cognitive disabilities that would have exempted them from ISTEP+ participation. Therefore, all students in the study were required to participate in the fall 2003 ISTEP+ testing session. Students with disabilities in the study were identified as having one of four mild disabilities as defined by the Indiana Professional Standards Board (Mild Mental Disabilities, Learning Disabilities, Emotional Disabilities, or Other Health Impairment. Teachers rated students using the ISTAR assessment during a fall testing window from August 1, through October 31, 2003. The Pearson correlation coefficient used to determine the relationship between ISTEP+ scores and ISTAR teacher ratings. Results of the Pearson correlation coefficient indicated a linear relationship between scores on the two assessment instruments for students in grades 3, 6, and 8 with mild disabilities and without disabilities who participated in both assessments (r = .46 to r = .71). An analysis of variance was used to determine if the ISTAR instrument could, when appropriately completed, differentiate between groups of students who would be expected to perform less well or better than other groups of students. Results from the ANOVA, Levene and Welch procedures as well as the Tamhane post hoc statistic indicated that ISTAR is capable of differentiating between different achievement level groups for the constructs of English/language arts and mathematics. While the study results indicate a sufficient positive relationship, it should be considered to be a baseline study. Additional years of data are needed before valid inferences can be made for the ISTAR assessment tool. / Department of Special Education

Relatively recent federal education initiatives, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB; 2001), have focused on school accountability for student achievement including achievement of traditionally at-risk populations, such as students in special education, students from low-income or high poverty areas, and students who speak English as a new second language. Additionally, these federal initiatives also mandate that all students take the same test measuring grade level standards despite research that has demonstrated that students from at-risk populations are sometimes at a disadvantage on high-stakes tests. Furthermore, initiatives such as NCLB are often at odds with other education initiatives such as IDEA, which states that students in special education should be tested at their respective level. Therefore, the current study proposed to examine the relationship between Cattell-Horn-Carroll cognitive abilities and performance on a state-wide high-stakes achievement test. There currently are no studies examining such a relationship. This study used Multivariate Regression Analysis, in order to investigate the relationship between CHC cognitive and achievement abilities and performance on a state-wide high-stakes achievement test, namely the ISTEP+, with 45 children who had been referred for a psychoeducational evaluation to determine special education eligibility and who had also taken the ISTEP+. No statistically significant result was found between the WJ-III-COG broad CHC abilities and performance on the English/Language Arts and Math performance of the ISTEP+. Furthermore, no statistically significant result was found between the WJ-III-ACH and Math performance on the ISTEP+. However, a statistically significant result was found between the WJ-III-ACH Passage Comprehension subtest and the English/Language Arts portion of the ISTEP+. The results indicated that students who had higher scores on the Passage Comprehension subtest also had higher scores on the English/Language Arts portion of the ISTEP+. The current study took a step forward in the area of the relationship between CHC and academic achievement, particularly state-mandated high-stakes testing given the dearth of research in this area. Given the data from the current study indicating a statistically significant relationship between Passage Comprehension and English/Language Arts from the ISTEP+, the current study has practical implications for school psychologists, especially when school psychologists are being asked to make predictions regarding a student’s academic achievement. Results of the current study might help elucidate reading problems and recommended interventions for those reading problems. / Department of Educational Psychology